In the early 1930s, upset with President Franklin Roosevelt, some well-placed businessmen plotted to stage a coup and install Gen. Smedley Butler (an odd choice, given Butler's independent character) as a fascist "President", or at least there's reason to believe they were plotting that.
Butler wouldn't go along with it, the plot failed, and FDR, thinking it best to not disrupt the country too much, never brought it out in the open, if in fact he did not outright encourage a general belief that the whole thing had never happened.
Read the recent Robert Reich item here:
The dangerous anti-democracy coalition
American oligarchs are joining Trump and his faux working-class MAGA movement
Reich reports that Elon Must recently held a billionair's gathering with the tehme of defeating Biden in which he invited; well. . . :
The guest list included Peter Thiel, Rupert Murdoch, Michael Milken, Travis Kalanick, and Steven Mnuchin, Trump’s Treasury secretary.
You've heard of Murdoch, of course, the Australian-born billionaire who owns newspapers of a certain type, and who has recently been opposed to Trump. And you've heard of Michael Milken. Certainly you've heard of South African born Elon Musk.1
Theil contributed $15,000,000 to J.D. Vance's campaign. And according to Reich:
Just 50 families have already injected more than $600 million into the 2024 election cycle, according to a new report from Americans for Tax Fairness. Most of it is going to the Trump Republican Party.
One of the really remarkable things about politics of the last 20 or so years has been the swamping of right wing money into it. Rank and file Republicans like to worry about George Soros, but it's really the far right that's getting the cash infusion, and it's showing. It had a major impact on altering Wyoming's politics existentially, taking a more or less "leave me alone, and I'll leave you alone" brand of local Republicanism into far right populism. Early on, that was accompanied by lots of money. So much so that one frustrated legislature told me that those forces were "buying the legislature".
The amazing thing to see is the degree to which those who have radically different economic interests simply follow along. Again, the far right likes to call everyone else "sheep", but the analogy actually applies to Republican voters far more, who vote against their own economic interests continually.
The extremely wealthy can use their wealth in any number of ways. It's notable that Warren Buffett and Bill Gates weren't on the list. But that this occurs at all is troubling, to say the least.
Capitalist may believe that their interests serve everyone else, and that "freedom" would be "preserved" in an odd sort of Pax Capitalismus with a Cesarean Trump at its head, and probably as a figurehead but wealth, business and capital doesn't exist for the wealthy, but for everyone.
Panem et circenses, hatred and discontent, and false internal enemies. Sadly, the trend is well-developed, helped on by a Democratic Party beholding to its own blood soaked, genitals obsessed left wing.
Sic transit gloria mundi.
Footnotes:
1. There's something concerning here that two really rich guys who were not impoverished when they showed up here are now messing with American politics in some fashion. This, as much as anything, shows how screwed up our immigration policies are. Both Murdoch and Musk ought not to be in the US at all.
2. It's getting impossible not to note the real rise of misogynistic commentary by the far right.
It's not the comments of people like Harrison Butker so much, as the comments by other characters on the far right. Butker's comments have to be taken from the position of traditional Catholic thought. In some Evangelical corners of Christianity, however, there are now some really beyond hostile views of the current roles of women. Interestingly, these same forces seemingly have no problems with conduct well outside the Christian norm, ranging from Trump's serial polygamy to Theil's homosexuality.
All this should give the far right pause. People like Trump, or Theil, clearly aren't in the traditional Christian camp if their own conduct is observed.
9.4 million illegal aliens have entered this country under President Biden, 1 million more than the population of New York City and more than 16x the population of Wyoming.
The unprecedented invasion is a direct result of the open borders agenda of
@POTUS
and Alejandro Mayorkas.
From a Twitter post of Wyoming Senator Cynthia Lummis.
Alejandro Mayorkas is not going to be removed from office.
Moreover, everyone with any political savvy knows this. Sen. Lummis knows this, as do the other members of Wyoming's Washington representation, one of whom will be a prosecutor in the impeachment trial, if an impeachment trial actually occurs, which I very much doubt.
Rather, the Senate Republicans will screw around with this until the Democrats dismiss it.
The validity of the impeachment process will be tarnished even more than it has been since the ill-advised GOP effort to impeach Bill Clinton brought us into the modern political impeachment era, and the border won't get address, in no small part because Donald Trump, who is in the first of what will be several trials, would rather have it as issue than address it.
Congress, of course, could have addressed this, but for following the Trump directive to the GOP. There's utterly no excuse for the GOP failure to act. If the bill wasn't prefect, it was much better than any others for years, and if they take a two house and Oval Office majority in November, which I doubt they will, they could have improved it. Indeed, their failure to act not only makes this look incredibly hypocritical, but puts them in jeopardy of losing the House.
We will see a Twitter storm of GOP tweets. Most will be ignored. The worshiping spectrum of the GOP, the ignorant populists masses, will swoon over every word while the now purifying corpse of the GOP elephant starts to stink even more, actual Republicans and conservatives not knowing how to remove it.
Indeed, on the Twitter Storm, populist far right Nebraska Senator Deb Fischer took to twitter to demand that Mayorkas receive a full trial in the Senate as, she suggested, the Constitution demands, while at least one of her critics noted she didn't feel that way when Trump was up for impeachment.
All this while very little gets done and Americans lose faith in their government, save for a tiny sliver who somehow feel the dissolution of a 200+ year old institution is serving democracy, when in fact it's destroying it.
April 18, 2024
And the Senate dismissed the articles of impeachment, making my prediction of no trial accurate. I thought there would be a motion to dismiss, and there was.
The motion came up immediately, and Chuck Schumer offered debate time, but Republicans, who apparently have no sense of procedure, rejected that, demanding a full trial, and thereby demonstrating the sort of hubris, ignorance and stupidity that criminal defendants sometimes do. Schumer replied and went right to the vote.
The vote was down the party line, Republicans who know better not having the guts to vote in favor of the motion.
By this point, the dysfunctional circus that Congress has become now attracts so little attention for even extraordinary events, which this fits into as it's an extraordinary dereliction of duty and common sense by those who voted for it in the House, that it doesn't even make the primary headlines.
No doubt Wyoming's Senators went home and breathed a sigh of relief, being spared acting on this absurdity, and also being spared the pangs of acting in contravention to their conscience. And the issue is preserved for red meat tweets, texts and speeches, so attacking the Democrats on an issue that Republicans refused to act on, when they had the chance, can still be done.
What is up with this category of movies? And by that, I mean movies that are properly the domain of children being dressed up, overblown, and released for adults. Are we unable to deal with the adult world anymore in any fashion?
As noted, I first started this draft in 2016. Maybe. The movie linked in was written about in 2015. Since that time, it's only grown worse. A flood of Marvel cartoon character films, amazing watched by adults, has since been released.
This genre of movie has been around for a long time, to be sure. D.C. comics character Superman first appeared in a live action film in 1948. But let's be frank, these films were stupid and meant for young adults.
Kirk Alyn in the 1948 version of Superman.
It wasn't until 1978, however, with another Superman movie that these films really crossed over to adult fare. They remain as stupid as ever, but they seemingly won't go away.
It's not just these films, I'd note, although they're the bulk of what I'm complaining about. An entire class of really stupid light comedy fare is out there as well. If Adam Sandler is in it, for example, it's probably stupid. But stupid live action comedies have seemingly always been with us forever. How else do you explain The Three Stooges?
A person may, of course, state what's the harm. But the harm is there in that these films are oddly enough taken seriously. People analyze them for what they mean, often attributing meaning to them that they likely do not deserve. Comparing them to myths of old, for example, is done, or comparing them to religious tenants and positions, is yet another.
And now they're being given social import, although in a backwards fashion. The next installment of the cartoon Black Panther is out, the same being Wakanda Forever. I didn't see Black Panther, and I'm not going to see Wakanda Forever, but it's clear that it riffs off of the popular American concept, at the current time, of powerful female led African kingdoms once existing. This is, quite frankly, simply American feminist fare and not really very charitable to real Africans, including real African women.
Powerful African kingdoms, within context, did exist, but outside of the Christian world women's roles have always been a bit grim to some extent. And looking at some of the real world African political entities wouldn't take you in this direction at all. An early slave rebellion in the Colonial south, for instance, occurred with a warrior society of Angolan Catholic slaves rose up and dashed off.
You read that right.
They were Africans, they were in a warrior society, and they were Roman Catholic.
There are a lot of good stories that could be mined here. But true ones. Why not explore them?
All of which leads me back to this. These infantile movies are somehow another example of panem et circenses. Light escapism. The fact that escapism has become so big. . . that's not really good.
Poppies. Poppy seeds were added to Italian bread in the middle ages by the poor, specifically to keep themsleves stoned most of the time. This was because their lives were bad. The German army passed out booze, and sometimes drugs, late in World War Two to "motivate" troops, or in other words stone them before they went into horrors. Somehow, we're headed back into the Italian situation.
Headline from The Denver Post:
Gov. Polis tells Bill Maher he’s
“excited” about medical ‘shrooms after voters pass psilocybin legalization
Colorado becomes the second state after Oregon to establish a regulated system for substances like psilocybin and psilocin.
Because Americans aren't stupid enough already, and Denver isn't enough of a giant doped up smelly dump.
Seriously, the march of intoxicants in this society ought to be an alarm bell going off. Something is really screwed up and the only thing a lot of people, and governments, can think to do is to keep people stoned.
A walk thought Denver's capitol city should show anyone, including Governor Polis, how messed up Colorado is as an example of this. Truly, and I'm not a teetotaler, if there's one thing that could have been done to help keep the country from getting where it now is, that we could go back and do, not repealing prohibition would be it.
Panem et circenses?
It seems so.
Bias?
Colorado Springs shooting suspect Anderson Aldrich is a registered member of the Mormon church, spokesman confirms
So what?
I note this as this does seem to be the sort of headline that imports next to no useful information but which reporters, because of a bias, believe it does. It's impossible not to read this and think that the suggestion is that Anderson Aldrich shot up a gay club because he's a Mormon.
I'm rather obviously not a Mormon, but I'm confident that the LDS church does not advocate this sort of thing in any sense.
This is, I'd note, just a stone's throw from suggesting that all members of any conservative religion that generally holds conservative social views is a menace to society, a suggestion I've seen in news articles more than once.
Bias confirmation
Most folks here no doubt don't follow it, but there's a thing called "Catholic Twitter", which is made up of Catholics, on Twitter.
The main thing about Twitter is the gross exaggeration of any one topic until it's at the screaming level. Most of the people on Twitter don't take Twitter all that seriously to start with, and they shouldn't, and any one topic that's on it is not likely to be all that important or reflective of what is going on in the real world.
Anyhow, below is a part of a conservation that got rolling and rapidly morphed into "blind my eyes to the evidence". How it got started I'm not sure, as it involves the now actually relatively old story of Catholic cleric's abusing some sexually.
It's worth noting that this story is horrific in general. But at the same time it was a minority of clerics, and most of this story is now really old. To the extent that it remains a real present story it is is because the Church has a lot of older leaders, much like American society in general, who haven't done a good job of confronting this, in part because they seem to have ignored it and don't quite get the story.
Anyhow, one Priest noted.
Fr Matthew P. Schneider, LC
@FrMatthewLC
The majority of victims of clerical sex abuse were post-pubescent males who were still minors.
Allowing men who were sexually attracted to post-pubescent male teens become priests likely had a part to do with the abuse (whatever name you give that).
Quote Tweet
Joshua McElwee
@joshjmac
·
Asked about prior comments that gay clergy were responsible for the Catholic clergy abuse crisis, new US Catholic bishop president Archbishop Broglio claims: "It's certainly an aspect of the sexual crisis that can't be denied." Academic studies have found no such relationship.
·Twitter for Android
Fr. Schneider is correct. Most of the abuse that occurred was male on male, and most of that was on post pubescent males who were legally minors.
Let's take a diversion here for a moment.
Just recently a French Cardinal publically confessed and condemned himself for what was translated as "an affair" with a 14-year-old female back many years ago when he was a priest, not a bishop.
That's horrific.
The headlines, however, rapidly went from "an affair" to "rape", or at least the Twitter ones did.
Here's the thing. Under the applicable French law, she was over the age of consent and could do just that. So the act was icky, gross, immoral, inexcusable, but not illegal. It wasn't rape as the law of that land, at the time, defined it.
FWIW, as that surprised me, I looked it up. The age of consent in France is now 15.
I always think of the age of consent being 18, but by and large in most of Europe, Ireland I think aside, the age of consent is lower than 18, with ages in the mid-teens not uncommon. I'm not going to post them all, but that's interesting in part because Europeans like to criticize the US for having legal pathways to "child marriage" while they have legal pathways to what we'd regard here as rape.
Anyhow, this is an example of following the evidence.
And the evidence generally is that most priest abusers were engaging in homosexual abuse, as legal line or not, "post pubescent" is a legal, not a physical, line.
Occam's Razor holds that the simplest answer is generally the best, because it's generally correct. The simplest explanation here is that most of the abusers were homosexuals.
Indeed, they pretty clearly were.
No, that doesn't make all homosexual men abusers, but if you put anyone in a situation in which they have no legitimate means for an outlet, problems arise. The real question, therefore, is how did enough homosexual men end up in the priesthood (and in Boy Scout leadership positions) for this to be statistically observable.
I've posted on it before, but my view is, on the priesthood, that this occurred as it gave homosexual Catholic men a place to professionally hide. That seems to be where the evidence leads. They weren't there because they were homosexuals per se, but because it gave them a socially acceptable excuse for not being married and, even more than that, not exhibiting any interest in women.
Well, of course, the Twitterverse couldn't accept that. The competing explanation, violating the principal of pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate, was that the abuse was male on male only males were around, and therefore they were the only targets of opportunity.
That explanation leaves a lot lacking. For one thing, males aren't the only humans around. The French example, which has become two examples, demonstrates that, and an example in our own diocese of many years ago demonstrates that as well.
And while all male environments do give rise to this, it's not quite in the same fashion. Those examples tend to be instances in which not only are only males around, but their virtually cloistered for long periods of time. Groups of straight conscripts, for example, don't start engaging in male on male sexual contact as there aren't women around. Indeed, studies have shown that in areas where there are only males for long periods of time, what tends to happen is that their testosterone levels plummet on their own, and they're simply less interested.
But because we must maintain this fiction socially now, we can't entertain the possibility that the abusers were homosexuals. We can't even really engage in the possibility that a small number of homosexuals are abusers.
The Zeitgeist.
What about the Boy Scouts?
I haven't researched it, but I'd guess that those abusers were attracted to those leadership roles specifically for the target of opportunity situation. So that situation was different yet. The difference, therefore, is that in the priest example I suspect homosexual men put themselves into that situation to avoid suspicion as to their inclinations, and then yielded in crossing a line which they should not have, and which in the US is illegal, but in the same country, at a time when pornification of child models was common, isn't surprising. In the Boy Scout example, that was probably a group of men who were abusers in the first instance, but with homosexual inclinations.
And no, that doesn't mean all homosexuals are abusers.
Less government?
The State gave out $6,600,000 in rent relief, funded by the Federal Government, last month.
This program has stopped now, but its interesting in that there's been so much howling in the state about Federal money. As other examples have shown, people can howl about the dangers of Federal money and take it at the same time.
Credit Cart Sales and Firearms
A recent headline read:
Guns bought through credit cards in the US will now be trackable
So what?
In the United States, you have a right to keep and bear arms. We all know this. But that really doesn't mean that private companies can't track it.
They're already tracking everything else.
If we really don't like this, what we ought to do is simply ban credit cars, which are inherently inflationary to start with.
Misplaced Complaints
A lot of people are complaining about Elon Musk buying Twitter and treating it like a toy.
Well, he's super rich and for him, it probably is a toy. He's probably loving seeing people complain as they dance to his tune. And that probably explains why he let Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene back on Twitters.
Just ignore it.
Twitter really doesn't matter. I noted this all the other day here:
Elon Musk has bought Twitter and is busy making changes to it internally. This, in turn, has resulted in a lots of righteous anger about his behavior.
Here's the real question.
Who cares?
We have a Twitter Feed. You can see it on the bottom right-hand corner of this page. That doesn't stop the fact that Twitter is basically stupid.
A person can't say anything worth saying in as few of words as Twitter restricts you to. All Twitter really is for us is redirection to this blog. Does it work? Who knows. But as far as weighty conversation, not happening.
Indeed, the fact that people seem to think its weighty shows how dim the American intellect has become, as if there wasn't plenty of proof for that otherwise.
Now, I have some feeds that I follow I really like. Some do nothing other than what this one does, direct you to other things Some are basically photo feeds, much like Instagram.
But as far as news or anything worth reading, not going to happen.
Some people seem to think that Musk shouldn't be allowed to own Twitter or, if he does, he shouldn't be allowed to wreck it. Well, why not? He owns it. If you are uncomfortable with that, as many are, the real argument is that a person shouldn't be allowed to amass the size of fortune that Musk has. Musk was born into a wealthy South African family, and he's made more money, showing I suppose that being born to a wealthy family is a good way to get richer.
It also shows how screwed up American immigration laws are, as Musk apparently lives in Texas. Why was he allowed to immigrate here? No good reason at all, and in a society whose immigration laws made sense he'd be back in South Africa, or perhaps someplace in what's left of the British Commonwealth.
His personal life also shows how Western morality has declined. Musk has ten children by three women, the first six by his former wife Justine Musk, then two by Claire Elise Boucher, the Canadian singer who goes by the absurd stage name Grimes, and finally twins via Shivon Zilis. If nothing else, this proves that vast amounts of money will get the male holder of the same money and sex, but it's not admirable and that this sort of conduct is no longer the type that is regarded as scandalous, although it should be.
None of which is a reason to get all in a twitter about Twitter. If he wrecks it, well, he bought it.
Who cares?
A bigger topic regarding Must, really, is should a just society allow one person to have so much of the planet's resources.
I risk sounding like Huey Long on this, but I really don't think so. There shouldn't be billionaires at all. Before you reach a billion in assets, indeed, before you reach $500,000,000, you simply ought to be taxed down to size. And no, I don't believe that disincentivises a person from "developing the economy". And if it does, well, I don't care.
We're now past the election, but speaking of that and I guess twitter, it's really time for John Barasso to stop coming on Twitter and complaining about the price of gasoline.
Here's how the price of gasoline works.
It's made from petroleum oil.
Petroleum oil is produced in certain spots of the globe and sold all over the planet before it's refined.
Most of the world, the United States included, uses more oil than it produces. This is true of the US even though its a major petroleum producer.
US petroleum is expensive to produce. Normally, Mexican, Venezuelan, Arabian and Russian oil, are not.
If the price per gallon is low (West Texas is $79.19/bbl as I write this. . . low), a lot of North American oil becomes uneconomic to produce. Just about $60.00/bbl is that point for the US.
If the price per gallon is high, it means that a lot of North American oil is economic to produce.
Wyoming only makes money on petroleum when the price is relatively high.
An unstable price doesn't benefit anyone.
Russia invaded Ukraine, and for a variety of reasons this has driven up the price of oil. OPEC+, which includes Russia, has operated to try to keep the price high.
Want lower prices?
Lower demand or increase cheap supplies.
We have no cheap supplies in North America.
Joe Biden doesn't set the price of gasoline.
Scary
North Korean is rapidly becoming a frightening menace.
The question is what, if anything, can be done about this short of military action, and will we reach a point where this seems necessary to any administration other than a Trump administration, which probably wouldn't.
